Game of Thrones: First of His Name

After several weeks of excellent episodes, Game of Thrones spins its wheels a bit this week. Not that it was a terrible episode, but not much happened.

Of course, even if it’s a mediocre week for Game of Thrones, I’m always sad when the episode ends. I could watch three hours of this show every week.

The “previously on” montage this week dug very deep, reaching back into the first season to find the appropriate plot threads. We even saw Ned Stark!

In the present, Tommen’s coronation goes off smoothly. Margaery looks on before getting majorly cock-blocked by Cersei. But surprisingly, Cersei is very pleasant to Marg and suggests she should marry Tommen and become queen again. Margaery plays it so cool, acting the grieving widow. “Oh, I hadn’t even given thought to what comes next.”

It turns out that Cersei has come to appreciate her father’s way of thinking, that the Lannister legacy is vital and that she must help make alliances to support the family, including marrying Loras Tyrell. She obviously has her own motives, and is playing her father in some way, but she’s back to being subtle. She meets with Prince Oberyn and they have a conversation about children (Cersei’s only daughter is a ward back in Dorne). “Everywhere in the world they hurt little girls,” she tells him.

Meanwhile Danaerys learns her efforts to liberate all the cities of Slaver’s Bay aren’t going so well. As soon as she leaves, the slavers come back. This derails her plan to conquer Westeros. She figures she can use the slave cities as a sort of practice kingdom. It would be cool if she could take all these city-states and make them into a new kingdom. When she says, “I will do what queens do,” I was desperately hoping she’d bust out with some Freddie Mercury. “Dynamite with a laser beam!”

There were some minor cute moments with Brienne and Podrick. He’s a terrible squire who doesn’t even know to skin a rabbit before you cook it. She’s impressed that he defended Tyrion by killing one of the King’s Guard, and eventually lets him help her remove her armor. She looks so good in that armor. Just pure badass.

Arya and the Hound were kind of meaninglessly cutesy, too. They argue about her list of vengeance, then he finds her practicing her sword moves. He finds water dancing amusing, and he mocks her proclamation that Syrio, her teacher, was the greatest swordsman in the world. “The greatest swordsman in the world was killed by Meryn Trant?!” “The greatest swordsman in the world didn’t have a sword?!” Her kid-size sword won’t go through the Hound’s armor. “Your teacher is dead and Meryn Trant is alive because Meryn Trant had armor and a big fucking sword.” I think Arya learned an important lesson here.

Petyr Baelish and Sansa arrive at the Vale. Lysa is creepy, her kid is creepy, everything here is insane. Baelish is willing to do a lot of terrible things to accomplish what he wants, including making Lysa scream on her wedding night. This part of the episode was most notable for the abysmal, heavyhanded exposition. Game of Thrones usually manages to avoid this sort of thing, which just feels like amateur writing. But there it was, Lysa telling Petyr things he obviously knows for no apparent reason other than so the audience knows. “Remember when you gave me the poison to kill my husband? And then write that fake letter to my sister?”

Really the only significant part of the episode was Jon Snow’s group attacking the traitors at Craster’s Keep. Every week I think, “I’ll grab a screen cap of Jon Snow,” and every week they look exactly the same. They all look like this:

The Brothers easily defeat the drunk traitors, although Locke said there were 11 men when he scouted, and it seemed like that fight went on for ages. I’m pretty sure they killed each of those 11 men four times. Although I could see the general beats of Karl Tanner’s death scene coming a mile away (about to kill Jon, then his eyes widen as he’s stabbed; about to kill woman, killed by Jon Snow), it was still surprising and awesome to see that sword just appear in his mouth. And the that shot from the side of the sword right through his head.

Most importantly, Locke tries to kidnap Bran, but Bran wargs his way into Hodor’s head, breaks Hodor free, and uses him to break Locke’s neck. Hodor is clearly disturbed by this when he returns to his own control. Bran has taken over Hodor before to quiet him, only briefly. But to take mental control of another person and use him to commit murder…pretty heavy. Of course Bran had to save himself, and no one mourns Locke. Plus, Bran is totally devoted to his mission to find the magic tree and the raven and whatever else is going on there. So much that he decides not to try to meet up with Jon, slipping away to continue the mission.

Then they burn down Craster’s Keep.

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Posted by Ed Grabianowski
on Sunday, May 4th, 2014. Filed under Dark TV, Headline, Horror.
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